Preserving for the future: Shell scripts, AoC, and more

devuan

On one of my Dell D630s running Devuan GNU/Linux, I ran into an interesting issue. It does not occur on my other D630, so there’s hope. Originally I actually changed from my i686 installation of Devuan ascii to the x86_64 version, but the problem still persistent.

After a few minutes of dedicated searching, I found the answer!

tl;dr

Put on the kernel line:

video=SVIDEO-1:d

Normally in /etc/default/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet video=SVIDEO-1:d"

And then you have to run:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Explanation

The symptom of my problem occurs when changing screen resolutions in X11, or switching to or from the X11 display to a different tty. The mouse responds and moves around the (graphical) screens, but nothing else is updated for about 10 seconds.

I investigated dmesg, and it shows the very interesting results at the bottom of the post. After shortening the snippet to paste into Internet search engines, I finally found an answer! This bug has something to do with handling the svideo output. Disabling the svideo output (my Dell Latitude D630 does not even have one!) makes the issue go away.

In my attempts to be more diverse in my GNU/Linux experience (and not be so dependent on systemd for everything), I am using Devuan on my old Dell Inspiron 1525.
Getting my Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] wireless network card working was one of the harder tasks on it. Installing freeipa is another, and it involved upgrading the distro to the rolling release version, ceres.

apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

Make sure that command downloads and extracts the broadcom driver. I think that package is from the contrib or non-free package set (in sources.list) and not main.
If it does not do the downloading part, you might have to remove the package and install it again.

modprobe | grep -E 'b43|wl|bcm'

Make sure the kernel module was installed by checking for it with modprobe.
I rebooted at various points, but it might not be necessary to do so. If you have to remove and add it again, use modprobe -r b43 ; modprobe b43.
I could then see the device listed when I ran

ip link show

I tried to enable it:

ip link set wlan0 up

But it warned me that it might not be able to do that because of rf-kill. Rather than remember/search how to do that on the cli, I just switched to wicd and checked the box for “switch on wifi.” Then I could set it up.
I also had to configure wicd to use “wlan0” as the wireless network card. And I threw in some service networking restart in here somewhere as well.
After all that, then wicd saw the wireless networks near me and I could join my wireless network!

Conclusion

Interesting, how running from systemd has made me embrace closed-source drivers. I don’t know what to say about that. But my laptop is not dependent on a wired network connection or systemd.

Additional notes

eudev:amd64 in ceres is giving me grief and will not install, which messes up pulseaudio I think, and certainly bluez and xserver-xorg-core. If you try this whole process on an Inspiron 1525, go with the 32-bit devuan and let me know it if works better.

Devuan, as a fork of debian that uses sysvinit (or another– your choice), still uses debian-based utilities. I come from the Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS rpm-based family of distributions, and I struggle with the dpkg-based package management on occasion.

I really dislike how the software upgrades will sometimes pause in the middle, to display the changelog. If I wanted a changelog, I’d go read it! When I issue a command to update packages, I want to walk away, and come back, and it be done, not get stuck at 20% because openssh changed some defaults and wants to tell me. It emails me anyway! I find the defaults of apt-get to be not sane.

Here is how to configure apt-get to run without pausing to display duplicate information or ask you questions.